It’s unclear how seriously the new faces of Ukip are taking the move, which Watson joked was a ‘soft coup’, and Benjamin described as “both important and hilarious.”

But Ukip are taking it seriously, and can see the huge potential of the party’s average age reducing and a boost to party coffers from membership fees - not to mention a direct line to around 2 million social media followers.

The unfortunate bit is that Paul and Sargon are thought of as “low hanging fruit” while Milo is thought of as discredited, but they still command healthy followings.

Bear in mind that since the EU referendum in 2016, UKIP basically collapsed because it had no reason to exist any more - it had a single goal, and it had achieved it. A lot of people thought "phew, at least UKIP will go away now" - nobody seemed that fond of the party itself even if they were on the same side of the European issue.

So they're down to a small core of members who are looking for something new to do, and this bunch of ... people who have joined are looking for ways to troll and get a wider audience. There were always some of the alt-right in the background in UKIP, so it's not a completely random hijacking of the party, but I think a lot of the more traditional UKIP supporters would find this lot fairly abhorrent. And to an extent, these people are trying to piggyback on a name that's still well-known in order to get more attention than they'd otherwise warrant.

Quote:

“Given that Ukip has been in a freefall since the 2016 referendum and is currently polling some of its lowest ratings in recent history, I think the party will probably be happy with this development,” Goodwin said. “ It could potentially be significant in terms of bringing in new members to a party that has been haemorrhaging them.

“But at the end of the day we’re talking about a party that needs a new message, not a new activist base. That’s the problem – after the referendum it’s not entirely clear who it’s speaking to and why.”

It's worth knowing that when UKIP is mentioned in future, though, it's now going to be more a lot of alt-right trolls rather than the same party Nigel Farage used to run. But to my mind they're still getting undue amounts of coverage for a party that no longer has any real support, or reason to exist.

Ukip’s controversial and gaffe-prone West Midlands MEP, Bill Etheridge, has dramatically quit the party, claiming that its character has been “permanently changed” and is now viewed by voters as “a vehicle of hate towards Muslims and the gay community”.

The move is yet another blow to the Eurosceptic party, which has driven hard into far-right territory under leader Gerard Batten, who has actively courted anti-Muslim figurehead Tommy Robinson in an obsessional quest against Islam (which he calls “Mohammedanism”).

As the article describes, the guy who's resigned is generally fairly extreme as well, although more of the "good old-fashioned racism" style. (One of his "controversial" moves was posing with a gollywog to protest political correctness, after which he had to leave the Conservative party).

Quote:

... This is not just a change in rhetoric. Batten has also welcomed a set of extreme online figures into the party, including fake news conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the anti-Muslim activist and disgraced former Breitbart star who called feminism “cancer” and claimed that Muslim immigrants would bring “lamb chops, yoghurt and gang-rape” to America.

...

The party used to be obsessed with Europe, but now it’s obsessed with Islam. There is a danger that some voters, increasingly frustrated with the Tories over Brexit (despite former Ukip backer Arron Banks’ attempts to infiltrate the Conservative party), will look around for a more Eurosceptic party to support, particularly if we end up with a hard Brexit. Ukip has become a far-right entity, but public perception of the party lags behind this reality.

Sounds rather similar to the way the "Alternative für Deutschland" party (AfD) is taking, starting out as a euro-sceptic party on the right of the conservative spectrum and moving right from there, leaving it's founders by the wayside... The AfD now is a ant-immigrant, anti-muslim, anti-feminist, anti-genderneutrality right-wing populist party with strong ties to the Neo-Nazi scene. It's anti-European only because Brussels is part of the conspiracy to make Europe an islamic continent by inviting knife-wielding pseudo-refugees to settle here (or something)...

Both of them were readily available when I was a child in the 1950's; and presumably for a long time before that.

Was yogurt really that available? I guess my parents just didn't buy it then because I don't really remember even seeing yogurt until the '70s when it seemed like suddenly it was the diet food of choice for just about everyone I knew.

Yogurt was a lot less commonly eaten before the 70's or 80's, and many people did think of it as an odd food; but my father liked it, so we routinely had it in the house, and we must have been able to get it at the grocery in what was then a quite rural area of New York State. [ETA: or else the milk delivery people carried it; I think we got it at the grocery, but I might be remembering that part wrong. We did get our milk delivered, and also ice cream, though by different companies.]

I don't remember when it started taking over large chunks of grocery shelves, but it's been quite a while.

Out of interest I did a bit of googling and it does look like while yogurt had certainly been around it was the '70s when yogurt first became somewhat commonly available (when some bright bulb added fruit and other flavourings) but it was the 90s when it really took off. Which makes sense. Plain yogurt?? The horror . Anyway all that to say no yogurt is not new to the US and anyone who really thinks that is revealing their ignorance - which considering the source makes sense!

Lamb is less commonly eaten in most of America than most other meats; but it's certainly around. And I associate it more with Judaism than with Islam; though that may be because my heritage is Jewish.

Yogurt is all over the place, in what seems like twenty seven different forms.

Both of them were readily available when I was a child in the 1950's; and presumably for a long time before that.

And, unfortunately, we also already have gang rape. That's been around for longer than the country has.

So was he trying to sound silly? It’s lamb. We’ve got to ban lamb because it’s now apparently as Muslim as yoghurt and whatever the white British nadsats did in A Clockwork Orange. And as everyone knows, Muslim things are eeeeevil and Shari Lewis was secretly indoctrinating us with that song that was somehow less annoying than Let It Go. (You know the one.) Also, lamb chops are a heinous crime upon humanity akin to gang rape.

I actually googled and watched a video of him saying that phrase (thank you very much for that. Now I need a cat video or three). It sounds like it should have gotten a laugh (he also said “gays don’t catch”—in case you forgot, he’s camp as a row of tents) but it didn’t and he moved right on.

Even if anybody out there still finds the whole 'Hurr hurr foreigners eat weird food' thing funny, the funny foreign food has to be something that a) most of the people listening won't also like and b) immediately recognisable as staple food of the people you're supposed to be mocking.

I doubt if many of his fans even know what is eaten by those immigrants from that one country I suppose every Muslim must from in order to share the same standard fare. Neither does he, if the best he can come up with is lamb and yoghurt!

ETA: pretty much every meat and dairy eater in the UK eats both lamb and yoghurt. Oh no, Shariah Law has got to us!

If I absolutely had to pigeonhole lamb and/or yoghurt as any type of foreign food, instead of 'dinner, hopefully', it'd be a stretch, but a case could be made for Greek. Not much of a case, it's wobbly and held together with string going thready at the ends, but odd target for your man Milo.

Now obviously he's far more impeccably English than I am and my social better by miles, and I don't mean to suggest he dines on anything other than fox cutlets and fillet of Eton and Harrow. Maybe something like Blackpool rock for afters, if there's a posh equivalent.
But it looks like 'posh' negates 'multicultural', at least for people who consider the latter just not done.

That's the problem with multiculturalism, more and more people are familiar with and have eaten signature food from the cultures someone wants to mock.

It kind of reminds me of when Marco Gutierrez tried to scare people about the threat of Hispanics by warning us of "a taco truck on every corner". Many people's response was, "yum!"

What’s worse is when bigots want to have their cake and eat it too. Remember that incident a few months ago with Kirstjen Nielsen? Apparently she decided that after a long day of actively persecuting Mexican immigrants and other asylum seekers from Central America, going so far as to kidnap their children and put them into concentration camps, Nielsen thought she’d have a nice meal at a MEXICAN restaurant. Naturally, she was shocked, shocked that the patrons of the restaurant might take offense at her actions and heckle her relentlessly while she tries to have a nice meal, after a long day of violating human rights.

Ok, just in case people don’t remember and aren’t clicking on the link:

“Count Dankula” is Mark Meechan, who was successfully prosecuted for creating and releasing a video where he trained a dog to respond to “Heil Hitler” and “gas the Jews”. He insists he’s not a Nazi and that the video was a prank (because the dog was cute and Nazis aren’t).

“Sargon of Akkad” is Carl Benjamin, an antifeminist YouTuber. He tries to appear intellectual, but the last thing I saw of him was a portion of a video where he mockingly read two “outraged” tweets, apparently under the delusion that he was doing something of substance (the tweets referred to a line spoken in a DOOM trailer. Not only was there no actual outrage, but everyone else was doing the exact same thing).

Remember that incident a few months ago with Kirstjen Nielsen? Apparently she decided that after a long day of actively persecuting Mexican immigrants and other asylum seekers from Central America, going so far as to kidnap their children and put them into concentration camps, Nielsen thought she’d have a nice meal at a MEXICAN restaurant.

To be fair, she's all in favor of legal immigration. All they have to do is meet the very simple qualifications the administration has set* and they can be legal immigrants and citizens as easy as 1... 2... the last digit of pi.

* High-school education or equivalent, have a job in the US that pays above the poverty line, have no criminal convictions, speak and read fluent English, don't be taking a job from a US citizen, provide two (2) character references from a Founding Father, be a Oxford Fellow, hold an EGOT, and at least one Olympic gold medal from each winter and summer event or a Nobel Prize for mathematics.